Tag Archives: Goals

What Is Your Motivating Strategy?

Push or Pull?

Once I was driving to Vegas with a couple of buddies. I was driving, and they were goofing around. They accidentally had knocked off my rear view mirror, so my friend decided he would hold the rear view mirror and check to see if anybody was behind us. Luckily we were in the desert, on long flat stretch of road with clear visibility, so it didn’t really pose any danger. For this particular situation, the mirrors on both sides of the car were fine.

We did have to stop and fix it before we got to Vegas, as driving around the city streets mid day required much more visibility.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently, and she was saying that she has a problem, and based on her conversations with some of her other friends, they have the same problem. She’ll decide on a goal, and get really fired up to go after it, whether I be losing weight, or learning a new skill, or making an effort to improve her current or find a new relationship. But something always seems to happen after a couple weeks.

She said she always starts out like gangbusters, and then for some reason, she loses her motivation and a few weeks later, her drive to achieve what she thought was extremely important fizzles to nothing, and it’s quickly forgotten.

She said several of her friends experience this same thing, and she was wondering if she was doomed to spend the rest of her life on short bursts of motivation for various projects that soon fizzle out. It seems to be a common problem for many people, especially for things like exercise and weight loss.

Could there be a solution?

One answer may lie in what motivates us. In NLP, there are these things called “meta programs.” These are basic, general filters that everybody has, ways that we categorize the world and our own feelings and beliefs. If you can uncover and change on of your meta programs it can completely change the way you view the world and the possibilities it contains.

Depending on who you ask, there are around twenty or thirty general meta programs, and while NLP tries very hard not to label anything as “good,” or “bad,” as everything is contextual and has it’s place, in meta programs, some “settings” seem to be more resourceful than others.

Generally speaking, each “meta program” has two different extremes, and being closer to one extreme tends to be more resourceful rather than being closer to the other extreme. It would be better to be 30% of one side and 70% of the other, rather than the other way around.

When I asked my friend what motivated her to start her goals, it became clear what was causing her to fizzle out. One of the “meta programs” is your motivation strategy. We are all either motivated by moving away from pain, or motivated by moving towards pleasure.

If you are motivated by moving away from pain, you may look at yourself in the mirror, get disgusted and get right into a high intensity exercise program. After a couple of weeks though, because you’re putting hard effort into your routine, the disgust diminishes, and the pain that you are moving away from goes away, which in turn kills your motivation. It’s like jumping back from a hot stove. You are motivated to move in a hurry, but only until you are far enough away so you don’t get burned. If you were to use your hot stove to motivate you to take a trip to France, it wouldn’t work out so well.

On the flip side, you can be motivated by pleasure too much. People that are incredibly driven to thrill seek and experience all kinds of endorphin rushes while ignoring the risks are an example. They are always after the next rush, but ignore the pain or injury they may be causing themselves. Another example is the stereotypical businessman that never has enough money. Always more, more more, until they keel over from a heart attack due to the massive stress they didn’t notice because they were always thinking more more more.

One analogy is the driving with the rear view mirror. You need to have some pain to remind you of, to keep you motivated, and a solid expectation of the pleasure you’ll receive when you get there. If you compare the sizes of your windshield to your rear view mirror, that is a good metaphor for the balance between a motivation away from pain, and a motivation towards pleasure.

So how do you do that in real life? Make sure you create several different emotional filled visualizations when starting out on your program, whatever it is. For the diet and exercise example, some good negative away from motivations would be your naked body in the mirror, all your buttons popping off at a party, the scale breaking when you stand on it. Some good positive motivating visualizations that would pull you toward your goal is an imaginary photoshopped picture of your face on a supermodels body, or listening to all your friends tell you how great you look, or getting propositioned on the street (if you like that kind of thing).

When you develop a powerful push/pull engine, by using pain to push you towards your goal, and using pleasure to pull you at the same time, you’ll have a much better chance of succeeding.

By using just this one meta program, the away from or toward motivating strategy, many people have found it incredibly easy to consistently and repeatedly set and achieve goal they otherwise would never have accomplished.

To discover many more powerful strategies using NLP to enhance your life, relationships, and finances, click on the banner below for more information.

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

The Long And Storied History Of The Turtle And The Ostrich

Symbiosis

Once there were these two friends, a turtle and an ostrich. Now, people aren’t aware of the close relationship between turtles and ostriches, because they don’t go around advertising their mutual endeavors. They are the kind of people that like to quietly get things done behind the scenes without drawing too much attention to themselves.

It wasn’t always that way. They used to advertise and let everybody know whenever they would embark on a mutually beneficial endeavor, or at least an endeavor that they hoped would turned out to be a win win situation.

But the coconut incident changed everything. That was a watershed incident, that proved to near disastrous for them. Had it not been for the intervention of the rabbit community, they would have split long ago, and could have perhaps evolved to become bitter and mortal enemies. Of course, that’s not the way I turned out.

There was this great big coconut tree, in the middle of the jungle. The turtles have long know to use the shells of the coconuts to decorate the inside of their homes, while the ostriches have long used the coconut meat as source of energy, for both short bursts and long term lasting energy.

As they were hanging out next to the coconut tree one day, the ostrich and the turtle noticed each other. After a few minutes of cautiously eyeballing each other, they finally approached one another. When they discovered that they wanted different parts of the coconut, they struck a deal. The ostrich, with its long neck, would push the trunk of the coconut tree, and the turtle, with its deep digging ability, would dig underneath the tree and gnaw away at the roots.

After they hammered out their agreement, they were very proud of themselves. Up until that point, there hadn’t been any cross species agreement of any animals. They went back home, and bragged to all their neighbors of their negotiation skills. What they saw the next day shocked them.

There was a crowd of other animals gathered around the tree. Some were looking on with curiosity, some were gossiping about how an ostrich could stoop so low as to work with a turtle. Still others were wondering why the turtle would share what was rightfully theirs with somebody as silly as an ostrich, who is prone to stick his head in the sand whenever trouble comes around.

Pretty soon the turtle and the ostrich couldn’t concentrate on the task. All the attention started to create frustration and anxiety. What if the other was secretly trying to con the other? What if this whole thing was a trick to make the other look bad in front of all these people?

It didn’t take long for both the ostrich and the turtle to focus more on watching their respective backs than doing the job that they had agreed upon. Pretty soon, the work came to a stand still, and the turtle and ostrich confronted each other.

You are trying to steal from me!

No! You are trying to steal from me!

There was almost a war between the two societies.

Turtle vs. Ostrich.

The other animals were quickly taking up sides. This threatened the very peace of the jungle. Just as they were about to come to blows, the rabbit stepped in. Actually, several rabbits stepped in. They had yet to choose sides.

They took both the turtle and the ostrich to a secret location, where they engaged in dialogue. There, a funny thing happened. Once the turtle and the ostrich were removed from the gossiping crowd, they remembered their purpose. They remembered what they had set out to do.

Just to make sure, the rabbit asked each one, in turn, and in great detail, what they were after. He asked the ostrich to describe just how he wanted to use the long burning carbohydrates of the coconut meat. He asked the turtle, in great detail, just how he was going to use the unique structure of the coconut shell to decorate his house. After much discussion, the turtle and the ostrich found themselves giving each other helpful advice on how to use their respective part of the coconut.

Then the rabbit spoke.

“Why did you forget what you were after? Why did you let a crowd of people whom you do not even know, change the focus of your intention? Are you so concerned with their opinion of you, that you would forsake your own desires for their approval? Do you not realize that it is their own lack of conviction, their own weakness in not choosing their own paths, which gives them the need to find pleasure in the hopes that you would fail?”

Both the turtle and the ostrich laughed.

Before long the turtle and the ostrich were busily back at work, and before long, they had the coconut tree toppled, and their bounty was great. After separating out the meat from the shell, they both returned back to their respective communities.

Soon after, they had a feast to celebrate their successive partnership, and vowed to always work together whenever the opportunity presented itself. And strangely enough, other jungle animals started doing the same.

And that is how all the animals of the jungle learned to work together.

The More Clearly You Define Your Destination, The Quicker You’ll Get There

Do You Know Where You Are Going?

I remember once me and a friend of mine decided to go hitchhiking. Neither of us had ever hitchhiked before, and we thought it would be fun to go camping that way. We both lived in the dorms, and our college was about fifteen miles away from the coast. Between the college and the coast were several businesses, industrial and residential areas. But on the other side, it quickly turned into pretty much nothing. A few rolling hills here and there, and small pockets of residential neighborhoods, and then desert.

Our plan was to hitch hike east until we found a place that didn’t have very many houses, and then camp out. Of course we prepared ourselves with plenty of water, food that didn’t require cooking. And beer. Lots of beer. After about three hours of hitchhiking, we finally found a suitable place to camp. Or drink until we passed out. Our only requirement was that it was relatively flat, and that it was far enough away from any houses so nobody could see our campfire and call the cops.

I took this seminar once on a weird type of speed-reading. It was called photoreading, and it taught you how to read an entire book in about 3 or 4 minutes. You slowly flipped through all the pages, and let the information soak into your brain without consciously reading it. Of course, you weren’t reading it consciously; you were reading it with your unconscious mind. Then later you could dig into your unconscious memory and pull out any required information that you needed. This was particularly useful for studying, or reading a bunch of books to do a report on something.

One of the things we needed to learn was to state a clear purpose for reading a book.

“I want to read this book to learn specific skills to improve my public speaking.”

“I want to learn specific techniques to nineteenth century Spanish architecture into my building designs.”

“I want to improve my fluency with daily use of French verbs.”

That way when you photoread the book, the elements that addressed your particular needs would stick better, and be easier to retrieve later when you needed them.

A particularly useful skill that we learned was photoreading a bunch of books on one subject, and then allow your unconscious alone to figure out how to incorporate those skills into your daily life. You never had to go back and try to “activate” some of the information if you were going to take a test or write a report. The new skills and behaviors would kind of just “show up” wherever you needed them.

There were a few people at the seminar that were repeat participants, and had used this technique with wild success. One lady photoread a bunch of books on painting techniques, as she was a beginning painter. After that her friends started commenting that her paintings were looking much better, and assumed she was taking lessons, or learning some advanced technique from some master or something.

In reality, all she was doing was photoreading a bunch of books on painting techniques, and the new techniques were just showing up in her paintings. She merely continued to paint as she felt, and the results spoke for themselves.

But before we learned how to do any of this stuff the instructor told us the importance of setting your intention before reading a book. What most people do is they read a book with only a vague hope that it can help them some way. It’s no wonder they have trouble applying what they read. They don’t really know what they were after in the first place.

He told us a funny story to emphasize this point.

There used to be this airline that was really cheap. You didn’t need reservations, and the planes always had seats available. They had several flights a day, so you could pretty much hop on a flight whenever you wanted. They were more than willing to sell you a ticket. The only problem was you never knew where they were going. The reason the tickets were so cheap was that the airplanes navigation systems were messed up. The pilots didn’t know how to program the destination. They sort of fiddled around with the buttons, and hoped they ended up somewhere decent. Sometimes they did, but other times they ended up in the middle of nowhere, and the passengers were left stranded on some frozen cornfield.

Of course, the airplane is you, and the pilot is your goals and choices. If you sort only know where you are going, with some vague hope that it will turn out ok, then maybe you’ll be ok, or maybe you’ll end up stranded on some frozen cornfield. Which we can all agree would pretty much suck.

I learned a lot from that seminar. They do have a book you can get at Amazon, called “Photoreading,” or you can get the home study course from Learning Strategies Corporation. Or you can take the whole seminar, like I did. It cost about three or four hundred bucks, but it was well worth it. Once you take it, you can take it as many times as you want after that, for free. If you Google “Photoreading,” you’ll find lots of pages to help you.

And probably the coolest thing about my hitchhiking camping trip is that after we finally got to our spot, and camped out without any problems from the cops, we started hiking back towards the highway to see if we could hitch a ride home. And this guy in limo picked us up. No joke. He had just dropped off a client, and was driving his limo back to his shop, and picked us up along the way. That was a fun trip. You never know how you’re going to end up with you start out like this.

Are You A Leader Of Your Life? Or A Passive Follower?

How To Become a Relentless Heat Seeking Missile

One of the best ways to improve your communication skills with other people is to create a solid set of underlying objectives. Most people float through life with only a vague desire to avoid as much pain and discomfort as possible, and this comes across in their communication. They come across protective of their egos and hesitant to speak their true feelings for fear of rejection and ridicule.

Of course this can be a hard thing to overcome. We have been trained since we were children that it is dangerous to speak our minds. At first, everybody loved us. Every single thing we did was cute and adorable. But then once we hit two or three, we became sometimes cute, and sometimes a nuisance. And the times we were a nuisance, we were told through several different and subconscious channels of communication.

It’s not wonder then that public speaking is the biggest fear in America today. We have been so programmed to be uncertain of any response to our expression that we more often than not live under the illusion that it is safer to just be quiet and as expressionless as possible.

However, the great paradox of communication is that while we crave somebody that will give us inspiration and direction, the best solution is to simply be that person to others. Most people are sitting around waiting for somebody else to go first and lead the way. Most people don’t consider the idea that it is just as easy and natural to lead, as it is to follow.

One of the ways to do this is to simply choose a few things that you’d like to create in life. The more you focus on these, the more they will start to present themselves through your various interactions with people.

The sad fact is that most people don’t have any goals in life to speak of, other than the ones that were given to them by society. Get a decent job, get a family, put in an honest days work every day. Be a good model citizen and don’t cause any problems.

If that is what you truly want, then I’m all for it. Those that are the happiest in their jobs and relationships have actually taken the time to ensure it really is their choice to live that particular life. However, it is becoming more and more apparent that more and more people seem to be drifting along through life half asleep, hoping the general expectations laid down by the collective society will be enough to give them happiness. Often times it is not.

One way to get started is to sit down and think about the things in your life that really like, and the things you don’t like. Make a plan to increase the amount of things you like, and decrease the things you don’t like. Most people, obviously, have a pretty good idea of what they like and what they don’t like. Very few have taken the time to formulate a plan to get more of the good stuff, and less of the bad stuff.

Most people drift through life hoping that more good stuff will magically appear, and the bad stuff will be taken away by some benevolent god or government.

When you develop a solid plan, and start to focus on achieving it, your daily interactions with people will magically transform. You will be seen as somebody who has a clear objective in life. Somebody that knows what they want. Somebody to be respected.

This has a strange, perhaps metaphysical way of coming through in your daily conversations. Perhaps due to the large amount of communication that takes place below conscious awareness, people can pick up on the fact that you are on a mission of your own choosing rather than shuffling to the collective beat of society.

How do you get there? Pick a few major goals you’d like to achieve in a years time. Get really specific. Every day, focus on one of your goals. Spend a few minutes imagining it and making it truly compelling. Focus on each day with something, anything you can do to get you closer. Spend a few minutes every night mentally reviewing your day and highlighting any efforts you made in the direction of your goal.

Man is a nomadic creature, designed through evolution, or God, or Mother Nature, to be a seeker, not a follower. Man was designed to find a point far, far off in the distance, and to relentlessly pursue it. We were not designed, nor do we come close to our potential, by keeping our head down and obediently shuffling along.

Find that point off in the distance, whatever it is. Make it real. Visualize it. Pursue it. Achieve it.

And let nothing, no man, no woman, no institution of society stop you.

How To Increase Your Resilience For Guaranteed Success

How To Become A Guided Missile Towards Success

There used to be this guy that I worked with. He was kind of a quiet, serious type of guy. He was always focused on his job, which was good. He was an electronics technician. This was at a company that manufactured these big machines that were then sold to various manufacturers of various large commercial and retail products.

This guy’s job was to trouble shoot new designs. The engineers would come up with a new design for a machine, and build several prototypes. Then they would give them to this guy, who would run them through a whole range of different operating conditions, and then give them back to the design engineers with his report.

At first, they would give him specific things to look for, but they realized that he could do a far better job on his own. So after about year, they just gave him the machine, and pretty much let him play with it for a couple weeks. In his report he would list the drawbacks, the benefits and what he would like to see from an end user’s standpoint.

The interesting thing was that the design engineers would use him for a large part of their research and development efforts, as his input was extremely valuable. It was also a good experience for him; having only a two-year degree he was giving input at the level usually reserved for upper management and senior level engineers. They would usually give him a product several different times during the stage of development, and with his input, they eventually created a device that was unmatched in that particular industry.

I was reading this self-development book the other day. It was talking about how some people choose their goals. Most people have a vague wish, take a couple steps, and get discouraged when everything doesn’t turn out exactly the way they want it. Which is kind of funny because since most people don’t really know exactly how they want things, it’s kind of hard to know when you get there.

But this book was saying that people should design their goals, and then think of themselves as a guided missile. What many people don’t know about guided missiles is the incredible amount of feed back from the environment they use to keep reprogramming themselves. They literally make hundreds of thousands of calculations along the way to their target, and are always adjusting their trajectory. If guided missiles were like people, they’d give as soon as they left the launch pad.

I was reading this book recently about how people tend to give meaning to events based on their opinions of themselves, and of their expectations of the outcome of the event. Two different people will do exactly the same thing, but they each will have a completely different interpretation of what went down. And based upon their interpretation, what they do next will be completely different.

So after a while, if one person is always looking at results, and adjusting their behavior to get better results, then they will usually get what they are looking for.

But somebody else, who instead of getting instant gratification sees only failure, will usually give up. They might try a bunch of different things, only to think that they fail all the time. This will destroy their self-esteem and their belief in their ability to get what they want out of life.

The first person will see a world filled with opportunities, while the second person will see a world filled with problems and limitations. And although the second person likely won’t ever admit it, it’s all based on how they choose to think of events that happen. The secret, according this book, was that all you have to do is change your interpretation of events, and you can pretty much do anything, with a long enough time line.

The other thing this book mentioned was to think more in the future instead of immediate gratification. If you are always looking for immediate pleasure, you usually won’t get anything that lasts very long. Kind of like planting seeds. Some plants grow very quick, but don’t produce much. Some take a while to grow, but when they finally reach maturity, they produce fruit year after year, without much effort on your part.

And my friend finally started his own consulting business, helping companies to design all different kinds of machines. Last I heard he just got a huge contract with a major automobile manufacturer. He has about twenty people working for him that he collected along the way. Word on the street is that his net worth is well into the millions. Not bad for a two year degree technician.

How To Exploit Juice Underneath Your Desires – For Sex, Love, And Money

Have you ever chosen a goal, only to find out that you really didn’t want it, or once you got it you thought maybe it wasn’t all that you thought it might be?

Or maybe you’re lucky enough to have had a goal, tried really hard to achieve it, and then failed. And after you’ve failed, you realized that you really weren’t after that goal after all, but something deeper, and by doing things that were moving you closer to the goal you thought you wanted, you were actually developing your skills that would make it much easier for you to achieve a much larger, more satisfying goal.

Huh?

Example.

I know a guy that really wanted to be a standup comic. He had watched comics as a kid, and really enjoyed him, and really wanted to be onstage telling jokes, and getting people to laugh. So he read books, went to trainings and seminars. He studied the structure of humor so he could write his own material. When it finally came time to get up on stage and burst onto the comic scene, he failed miserably.

He was literally booed off stage again and again. His jokes were horrible, his delivery was terrible, and his timing was awful. For a while he was completely demoralized. The he started learning about personal development and motivation. As it turns out, studying the structure of comedy is closely related to the structure of human understanding and how we humans view the world. Which is very closely tied to our own motivational strategies and our beliefs about what we are capable of.

So he started studying and learning more and more. And he found out there was a huge demand for this kind of seminar. He started giving seminars that quickly sold out every time.

The skills he had picked up along the way, studying about human nature through comedy, and practicing public speaking skills against a ferociously unappreciated audience gave him incredible understanding of other peoples pain and fear, and incredible effective public speaking and motivation skills.

Had he not tried and failed as a comedian, he would never have succeeded as self-development coach. His seminars still sell out whenever he gives them, and he is making quite a bit of money today.

But the point of this essay is not to encourage you to chase after a goal and then fail. If you started out with that mindset, you’d likely not chase it with near as much gusto as is you were expecting to win.

The point of this is to encourage you to really examine the goal you are chasing. Really really examine it. What is it about that goal that is so appealing to you? What will you have, feel, and experience when you achieve that goal? Is there and even better, quicker, and easier way to feel, experience and have those same things by choosing a different goal?

In the example above, the underlying criteria of becoming a comic might have been to make people feel good, and happy, and feel good about oneself for delivering those emotions to others. There are many ways to do that. Being a comic is certainly one way, but is it the only way? Is it the easiest way?

There is one very powerful motivating factor in psychology called commitment and consistency. This has been proven to be a very powerful social influence technique. People that publicly claim they are Republicans will never vote democrat, but people that never commit publicly to either party are much more likely to vote for a candidate not based on his party, but on his or her qualifications.

In the jury system, studies have shown that juries where they publicly voice their opinion (guilty or innocent) before deliberation have a much harder time coming to a consensus. Those that indicate their initial opinion anonymously (writing G o I on a slip of paper) have a much easier time agreeing on a consensus. The people that publicly claim either guilty or innocent have a much harder time changing their minds.

This same dynamic is in place when setting goals.  Sometimes a goal that should have been abandoned a long time ago is still pursued, only because the person made a decision to get it, no matter what.

Of course, this is not to be confused with simply giving up on chasing a goal due to some adversity or difficulties in achieving it. This is about a goal that has lost its relevance.

When you can really dig down deep inside your mind to discover the real reason behind your goal, and go after that, the goal itself can become a temporary placeholder in your mind for your deeper, and more important criteria. Once you identify what that is, you will realize that there are many more ways to get there.

This can take some time and person introspection, but it is well worth the effort.  When you realize that the underlying structure of your experience is something worthy of your attention, you can be assured you will be successful.

Tap Egyptian Power of Success

I was sitting in a bowling alley recently, waiting for my turn, and this guy sitting next to me started talking about the Egyptian Pyramids. He was explaining all the historical and political significance of them, which I had never really thought of before. When most people think of the pyramids, they naturally think of these giant structures that were built out in the middle of the desert, many thousands of years ago by a culture that we can’t begin to understand. Some even believe they had influence from alien life forms, as some of the structural mathematics matches up keenly with certain elements of our solar system and out galaxy.

This guy was telling me how it was a brilliant political maneuver by the government at the time. They were very dependent on the Nile for almost all of their food, and when the Nile didn’t provide sufficient water, many people suffered. Every year the Nile would flood, submerging many peoples houses and farms, so they were not only dependent on the Nile, but they had to live and move according to its behavior.

Having a whole people who felt they were at the mercy of the gods was not an easy people to govern. Any edict the Pharaoh would proclaim would always be conspired in light of the heavens and the forces of nature, and would consequently take a back seat.

Enter the pyramids.

Deciding to build the pyramids was a stroke of genius. It gave virtually every Egyptian a feeling of being in control of something, for the first time in their lives. They knew they were building a very large structure, and they could even imagine a point up in the sky that they were aiming for, and that they would one day reach. To go even further, the engineers designed the pyramids so that when they were finished, they would point to a certain and prominent star in the sky, so even at night the people could connect their daily activity towards a specific goal to a far of distant point of light in the mysterious night sky.

If you’ve ever taken the time to look at your goals, it’s important to have them defined in two different ways. One way so that you can determine exactly when you have accomplished them, and giving you a specific time and place to focus your attention. Keep your eyes and mind on the finish line at all time, so to speak. This way your brain knows exactly what behaviors to do and not to do in order to get you to your goal. Many people set goals and fail, not because they don’t want them, but because they are not set with enough clarity and specificity.

The other important factor is to set a goal in a direction that you want to go in. Once you achieve your goal, you are going to have to come up with another one. Resting on your laurels has long been known as a killer of motivation and success. When you choose a far of direction, like the horizon, or a star in the sky, you will keep on going in the right direction, and can keep your motivation when you stumble along the way.

When you set both of these with enough clarity and specificity, you will almost get to your goal automatically. Just like the pyramids, once they set the plans, gave everybody a clear idea of where the were going, the pyramids went up almost automatically. And anything you want to create in life will go up just as quickly and as smoothly.

One thing that did go very smoothly, was my bowling. It seemed that every time I released it, it would roll very smoothly straight to the gutter, and my friends very quickly erupted in laughter and told me what an entertaining bowler I am to watch.

Paint Your Future Brightly

I remember a few years ago I bought a condo. The first thing I wanted to do before moving in was to repaint the interior. So naturally, I was overwhelmed by the eighteen million different shades of white available at home depot. So I chose some flavor of white I thought would be appropriate, and was surprised when the guy at Home Depot asked about a drop cloth.

A drop what? I asked? He explained that I would need to cover the carpet, and put tape up over all the electrical fixtures, and put tape over all the door jams. And probably tape the drop cloth on the floor, as being a first time painter; I would have a lot of splatter to contend with.

I quickly realized that getting the place ready to be painted was going to take nearly as much time as the painting itself. When the guy started talking about primer, and spackle and all kinds of other home improvement language that I didn’t understand, I left before things got out of control.

There was a guy I was talking to in a seminar who was telling about this book he had read on goal setting. The guy in there said there were two different kinds of goals. One kind was milestone goals, or goals you could measure once you got there, like losing weight, or a certain score on the golf course.

The other kind of goal he referred to as horizon goals, or goals that are specific. They are more like a direction that you want to go to in life. Like the horizon, the more you walk towards them, the more they will stay off in the distance and give you a direction. As long as you can see the horizon, you know which way to go.

And if you are wondering about what to do when you are surrounded by horizons on all sides, it helps to align your horizon goals with your milestone goals.

For example, if a horizon goal was to live a healthy lifestyle, then milestone goals could be a specific weight or dress size, a specific time in a 10K, or a certain amount of pounds to bench press. Your horizon goal would always keep you thinking about eating healthy and getting enough exercise, while your milestone goals will give you something specific to shoot for, and measure and celebrate once you achieve them. The beauty of this is that if you have a solid horizon goal, then every time you achieve a milestone goal, you can simply choose another one off in the distance a few months and keep on truckin.

A great way to motivate yourself is to place the milestone goals in the future, and then drift up into the future and look back on the goals you will have achieved when you get there to give yourself some ideas of how you did that. Then when you come back into the present, you can bring the information from your future self of how you achieved the goals that you want to accomplish. Kind of like having twenty twenty hindsight for something that hasn’t happened yet.

So when I finally finished painting, and took down all the tarps and mats and tape and whatever else I had put up, it looked pretty good. One of the best feelings you can experience is when you stop, stand back and look at something you’ve accomplished. It’s one thing to receive unexpected gifts from others, but it is quite another to admire something you’ve created through your own efforts and inspiration.

Stay Focused On Your Target

I had a friend of mine that worked for a trading company. It was a medium sized trading company, and their mission statement was to be the biggest trading company in the world. They had set that goal several years ago, and had been steadily growing to that end. However, with the recent economic troubles, their market share had been slipping, and they were in danger of not achieving their target. My friend that worked there worked in the new accounts department. His job was to find foreign markets for the products that they were importing from other countries. They had certain requirements for each distributor, and sometimes it took a while to find out the information that was required.

They had the company goal written on a large poster. They spent a lot of money on a graphic artist to come up with a symbol of their future goal. It was a combination of a graphical representation of the market share they were after, combined with the symbol for the company as chosen by their founder a over a hundred years ago. It was a very impressive emblem that everyone was required to have in their office. My friend had his hanging over his desk, so that he would see it when he first came in every morning.

He also kept a large white board in front of his desk, as sometimes they would have meetings. When they would have issues that came up during the meeting he would leave them on the white board, so he could look at them while he worked, sitting behind his desk.

I remember once when was a kid. I went away to summer camp while I was in boy scouts. The way it was set up was that you chose about five or six merit badges that you wanted to get, and then you spent the time working on them while you were at camp. It was important to choose what you wanted before camp, because they learned from experience that if you didn’t choose beforehand, you would just kind of mess around and not really achieve anything. They said that even choosing one thing with confidence was better than choosing a bunch of merit badges that you think you might enjoy getting, only to realize you didn’t really want to get them enough to go through the actions required to actually get them.

One of the ones I chose was archery. It was pretty cool. We had to learn all about the names of all the equipment, all the safety requirements, and you had to score a certain number of points on a regulation archery course. Before doing this we were required to practice a lot of mental visualization. The most important one was to focus on the target above all else. The instructor told us that in order to hit our target, we had to imagine the arrow going straight into the bull’s eye. You had to take several deep breaths before shooting, and then see the arrow hitting the target in your minds eye. Then you had to exhale slowly, pull back the bowstring, and slowly release.

One thing I never thought about was how to adjust for you misses. In order to get enough points to get the merit badge, you didn’t have to hit a bulls eye every time. You could even miss the target completely. So long as you were able to watch where the arrow went, and then adjust your aim accordingly. The instructor told us that it was important to accept every result that we got, and get upset if we missed our target. To simply watch where the arrow went, and adjust our aim accordingly. He said that if we did this, then getting a merit badge in a couple of days would be automatic.

One day my friend had an idea. He switched the placement of the white board, and of the emblem that his company had designed for the goal. He placed the emblem in front of his desk, where he was always looking at it. And after the meetings, he would leave the main issues on the whiteboard as before, but he would roll the white board so it sat behind his desk, where he could turn around and look at it when he needed to remember what problems to move away from. He found that by keeping his problems behind him, and keeping his target in front of him, he found it much easier and much quicker to achieve the company goals.

Does Snake Oil Really Work or The Power of Visualization

There used to be this guy. He was a normal guy, with a normal job. He had some normal friends, some he liked more than others. He would meet his friends from time to time, and do some various activities with them. Some of these, of course, he liked more than others. Sometimes, after a long workweek, he didn’t have the energy to go out on the weekend, so he would stay home and watch TV, or read the latest novel, or play video games on his computer. Once in a while he would go see a movie, but he always felt a bit strange going to the movies by himself.

He figured he had a pretty good life. But sometimes, when he wasn’t occupying his thoughts with the latest craze, or some time filling activity with his friends, he wondered what he was doing with his life. Once he went to a coffee shop to hang out and read the latest thriller novel, but he forgot to bring it, and so he just sat and thought about things for a while. The cute girl he was hoping to flirt at the coffee shop wasn’t working, so he just kind of stared out the window and let his mind wander wherever minds like to go in those situations.

He started to trace back through his personal history, to determine when he’d made the choices that led him to where he was. Not right there in the coffee shop, but in his life, his job, his friends, his apartment, the area of town he lived in. He wasn’t too surprised that his life was a string of events that were more or less accepted by him, rather than chosen by him. The last time he made a really strong choice was when he decided on which university to go to. Even then his choices were influenced by many other factors. His friends, his parents, what his guidance counselor had told him in high school. He chose his major based on his interests, but again, it was based largely on what kind of job he would be able to get with the major that he chose.

When he accepted the job offer, it wasn’t like there were fifty companies competing for his skills. He had applied to several, got interviews at a few, and took the first decent offer that he received. It was a good company, but he didn’t’ really have as much choice in the matter as he’d let himself believe.

He finished his coffee, and started wandering around the mall he found himself in. It was a Saturday afternoon, and he didn’t have any plans, so he kind of wandered aimlessly, like he’d been doing pretty much his whole life. He wandered into a bookshop. Not a big bookshop like a major chain, but a small, niche market bookshop. He browsed around and picked up a book on manifesting. He had always thought that this subject was a bunch of nonsense, that was nothing more than modern day snake oil. What he found inside this book was fascinating, to say the least.

The book described how mankind was a complex biological social organism that had developed over the course of millions of years. And that human social behavior was goal driven, but for many, those goals are determined by those outside of the individual. People have the ability to choose their own goals, or let others choose their goals for them. Of course, it is much easier, and less risky to allow others to choose the goals for them, so nature has this goal setting mechanism built into the human mind by default. But it can be overcome. The book went on to explain that by creating a very compelling idea of what you want to create, and focusing on that idea again and again, your actions will start to naturally and unconsciously pull you towards those pictures that you want to create.

This guy decided to buy the book and try this out. He spent several weeks coming up with one or two things that he would like to have. His own home, a relationship with a sweet, kind and beautiful woman, a salary double what he was making now. He created several pictures in his mind of each of this, and focused on them whenever he had a chance. Pretty soon, he found himself doing things that he didn’t do before, but seemed to be drawing towards the future that he was imagining, rather than the future that he had allowed others to imagine for him by default.

He started doing things a little bit differently at work, which got him noticed by upper management. Soon he was promoted, and making more money. He started going out by himself, instead of hanging out with his friends. And when he went places, he went to museums, charity events, and other social gatherings rather than the same bars he had been going do. Pretty soon he was dating a few candidates for a serious long-term relationship. And with his increased salary, he was saving enough to put down on a nice house in a neighborhood. Pretty soon his life was completely changed, for the better, and almost as if by magic. The perplexing thing, to him at least, was that he didn’t remember deciding to actually do anything different. All he remembered was making up those pictures of the things he wanted, and focusing on them several times a day. Everything else was pretty automatic. Another thing that came to his attention was how incredibly happy and motivating his life had become. Amazing how these things work.